


Escape Velocity

by tenser



Category: Shoujo Kakumei Utena | Revolutionary Girl Utena
Genre: Alternate Universe - Post-Apocalypse, F/F, with echoes of Mad Max
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-16
Updated: 2017-12-16
Packaged: 2019-02-15 16:42:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,867
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13035252
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tenser/pseuds/tenser
Summary: This is it now. What’s left. This world made of fragments, each piece sharp and pretty as pieces of stained glass. Just pieces of once-whole truths that now communicate nothing of meaning to the small horde of humanity trapped and protected within Ohtori Academy’s walls.





	Escape Velocity

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Panny](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Panny/gifts).



This is it now. What’s left. This world made of fragments, each piece sharp and pretty as pieces of stained glass. Just pieces of once-whole truths that now communicate nothing of meaning to the small horde of humanity trapped and protected within Ohtori Academy’s walls.

Anthy Himemiya, original survivor, Rose Bride of Ohtori, stands within the glass-domed Rose Garden ensconced in the lavish if incomprehensibly composed found-object architecture of the city-state within an endless sea of inhospitable wasteland.

The Rose Gardens’s structure of once-grand metal beams, collected from the gutted or obliterated structures they survived, twist down in a web of broken steel, trapping her like prey foundering between the equally dangerous threads of a spider’s web. 

Precariously cupped plates of warped glass rest uneasily between the eclectic and corroded steel. Although the glass allows a dull pulse of light in, the clear sky and clouds they might have shown are obscured by the injury to the windows themselves—the thickness where the glass pooled when the explosions or fire melted them, and the thinness where the elasticity of the glass stretched under immense heat to the point of permanent disfigurement. How fitting the windows’ promise of a view to the outside is as warped and false as the greater reality of Ohtori Academy, a world unto itself after the end of the world. 

“Watering roses again?” An elegant woman with long reddish-blond curls, a sharp uniform, and a sharper gaze frowns as she enters the sanctuary. 

Anthy bristles, but betrays no emotion on her face. “This is the duty of the Rose Bride,” she says in carefully moderated neutral tones. The garden is supposed to be the Rose Bride’s sanctuary, given that she is allowed no bed of her own, but for the very same reasons as she herself is violated, so too by extension are the places that are supposed to be hers alone so easily penetrated by those who believed she is an object to be owned. 

“It’s a waste of water. I told you not to do it anymore,” the unhappy woman says, advancing into the sanctuary through a procession along the small paths still not yet filled amongst the abundant greenery and blooms. 

“My apologies, Miss Juri,” Anthy says, still pouring a delicate stream of clear water from her charming golden teapot into a thicket of blue roses. 

“I told you to stop!” Juri raises her voice, branches slapping at her thighs as she quickened her pace towards the demure girl tipping the last of the water into the frivolous flowers. 

“All done,” Anthy smiles.

“You idiot,” Juri makes a gesture of dismay. “Give me that teapot.”

“Yes, Miss Juri,” Anthy smiles and hands over the empty teapot. 

The easily-angered woman seems appeased. Inwardly Anthy curses herself for letting someone take such a valuable heirloom from her, but if there was any consolation, once the next Duelist took her as their Rose Bride, Juri would be forced to return all objects and erase any trace of her possession, or be forced to drop from this endless game of ownership of Anthy.

“Water is too valuable a resource to waste on this useless garden,” Juri says, much more calmly. Condescendingly. As if trying to force agreement on a plain and simple issue that even a child should understand.

“Yes, we would die without water,” Anthy agrees. 

“Good. Then you see the necessity of letting this place wither and die. For the greater good.”

“But then where will the roses to reward the victor of your next Duel come from?” Anthy remarks casually.

Juri freezes for a moment, the reminder of her tenuous control over the girl beside her, and all the power that possession promised, suddenly forced to the forefront of her mind. 

“Well you don’t need a whole garden for that,” Juri snaps, her fiery temper once again stoked by the smallest spark. “Just a bush each for each student council member—Touga, Saionji, Miki and myself.” 

“Of course,” Anthy says. “And all the other colors in memory.”

“What does that mean?” Juri says, the fear of Anthy’s own mysteriousness stalling her in this case, rather than the imagined threat of her peers. 

“Of course there are no other Duelists,” Anthy says cryptically.

***

Juri’s pride is a living thing. It may not have a body outside of the woman’s powerfully built form, but it makes itself known well enough. It causes the angry slant of her eyebrows, it informs the speed of her exacting walk. At night in their shared bed it crashes into Anthy’s body, trying to shame and drive out Anthy herself so it can have more space. 

Anthy doesn’t regret the lack of passion between them, despite the franticness of their lovemaking. She does somewhat enjoy their coitus, at least physically. Juri is far more talented in bed than Saionji, but comparing _homo sapiens_ to _homo neanderthalensis_ is hardly fair to the latter. 

But the weight of Juri’s delicate and volatile emotions strains Anthy, and she finds herself convinced of the necessity of altering the interval before the next Duel, a count calculated from End of the World’s obsolete reckoning, until another Duel allows the chance for another Duelist—the outcome of sport is always a surprise, and surprises are the only way to survive boredom—takes her place. 

Today Juri leaves their room early in the morning, as usual, the bright light from their heavily-windowed room bathing the ornate furniture as fanciful and perfect in its pastel proportions as Juri, with her rapier training and orange hair. Recycled lattices keep the small pieces of glass in place in the most elegant method possible. Wrapped within the silk cocoon of the threadbare but once-fine silk sheets, Anthy feels anything but safe. 

Owlish round-framed glasses, not her first choice but the ones left over after enough slaps to her face sent all the more modern ones skittering fatally to the cement floors in what, to her, was the truest waste of resources. Since the apocalypse and Ohtori’s necessary isolation from the rest of the world, the fruits of the 10,000 years of human civilization became difficult to come by. 

Well, Anthy’s seen better than what humans have created. Certainly better than what they have here. At first she thought she’d see better again, but humankind’s folly and ingenuity go hand in hand. This end of the world is all that’s left for them. 

She slides out of the sheets, bare feet brushing against soft carpet, the elegant but simply patterned rug pushed up against her side of the bed while the rest of the gleaming wood-paneled floor remains spotlessly bare. The nice rug is a consideration, she supposes, but not appreciably meaningful to either her or Juri.

Half the room’s ration of breakfast remains uneaten and neatly set aside on a well-worn silver tray that valiantly gleams in the spots that have miraculously escaped scuff. Anthy dumps it into a small dirty sack. 

Her teal and white uniform goes on without ceremony, the silly striped tie sliding under the innocent flip of the sailor collar. Equally darling black Mary Sues slip on before she leaves, prim and feminine as the non-offending smile plastered on her face. The shoes clack prettily down the wood-paneled hallway and the stairs that take her into the courtyard of Ohtori Academy’s main campus. 

The incongruent nature of the academy becomes immediately apparent; the bows of battleships pointing gracefully towards the sky while their buried hulls nestle against classic columns. 

When one is trying to save the breadth of human civilization, one can’t be too picky. 

There is a cacophonous beauty she’s come to enjoy, as much as she can enjoy anything in this place. She’d rather focus on the swooping arches than the humans, at least, who in their youthful insecurity continually harass her—understanding in some primitive way that she is strange and different from the rest of humanity. A gaggle of such girls wait for her at the entrance to the music hall. Smile plastered in place, she walks towards the vultures. 

“Anthy!” calls a fretful young voice. 

She turns, but the gesture is useless when the blue-haired boy rushes into the space between her and the girls. It’s a sweet gesture, made completely consciously. Miki is a sweet boy. 

“What is the matter?” she asks kindly. 

Yet he is still concerned despite her smile and warmer demeanor. 

“Come with me right now!” he touches her arm, guiding her to a side door. 

“But that’s—“

“Sorry!” Miki apologizes as soon as the door shuts behind them. It’s a small room with a mirror, and a latrine. “It’s just— You should look at your hair!”

Anthy does. It’s wild and loose. She completely forgot to pin it up. 

She frowns. It’s honestly been decades since she forgot something like this. 

“I can help,” Miki asks, hopeful.

It’s only a small bother to manifest bobby pins in her hand and pass them to Miki. He so obsessed with touching her hair that he doesn’t ask where they came from. His trembling fingers press against her scalp as he curls and sets the hair. His still-innocent yearning for her is apparent, but she ignores it. If the blue-haired boy is at all lucky, his possessive sister Kozue will claim him for mating before he dies in a Duel or as the result of being a Duelist.

When they finish, Anthy stands and smiles, as if she hasn’t just been felt up in a public bathroom by a student council flunky. Rather, as if she’s been given a gift, she says, “Thank you.”

“I suppose you know, but…there’s a Duel is this afternoon,” he says.

“I look forward to it,” Anthy says with a smile.

Miki flushes and makes himself scarce, which is gift enough. 

There’s really only one boy who she likes, and she decides to forgo class to visit him. 

***

Chu-Chu is grateful for the scraps she brings him. Gorges on them, his limited intelligence resulting in behaviors far more honest than the actions of the twisted and stunted psyches of the student council. As Chu-Chu’s bulging stomach heaves, Anthy surveys the world of Ohtori from their picnic location. It’s the grassy slope of the mound containing the Forest, and it offers a direct view of the Ohtori Tower and campus. Anthy rubs her hand through the grass aimlessly and is distressed to discover the greenish yellow blades are as dry as straw, no doubt a casualty of Juri’s mindless conservation campaign. The parched blades prickle against her bare thighs and rudely poke into her skirt, their bladelike nature dredging up painful associations of hot prickles that are better forgotten. 

Wind, or rather the simulacrum of such, rustles the branches of the imposing forest behind her. The rattling woosh startles her, and for a vulnerable moment a vision of the world before overtakes her. The searing reality isn’t so much a remembrance of the natural, but of how unnatural the landscape, and what lies inside the mound. Reality is too much to bear—although Anthy deliberately flew from her birdcage to spend the day closer to reality with her semi-sentient monkey—she feels too exposed now on this hillside, the heart of Ohtori ticking beneath her, and only her knowing the truth of the place. 

“Did you enjoy your meal, Chu-Chu?” Anthy smiles at the light-blue monkey wheezing through his digestion. 

“Chu~” he says.

“That’s nice,” she says. “I’m so glad you liked it.”

The monkey gurgles. 

“I won’t tell Juri about it,” she adds. 

_Is this really what it’s come to?_ she asks herself. 

An old, familiar voice answers with amusement in her head, _You always did like talking to the test animals._

Anthy snaps her head around, hoping for the millionth time to see the owner of the voice. 

“It’s all a hallucination,” she says, curling into a ball where she can hide her head behind folded arms.

Her brother isn’t real anymore. 

She doesn’t need this _offness_ today. Today is a Dueling day, a day where she shouldn’t have to think. She started the wild free-for-all contests of speed, driving prowess and resource gathering in the wasteland so that she wouldn’t have to dwell on mourning for what humanity, and more importantly, she personally, has lost. There are rules, and boundaries to keep the ghosts at bay. 

A clock strikes and a bell smelted together from other hopes and accomplishments tolls. 

Brushing off the fragile tips of grass clinging to her skirt, she rises. 

She’s not entirely sure why she pulls Chu-Chu into the shelter of a small bush, except that she cares for him, and even if the rumbling from the Forest will shake him into wakefulness soon, he derives a small amount of peace. Anthy then makes her way to the side of the walled Forest. There’s a touchpad resting underneath overgrown ivy that she brushes aside and places her palm flat against. A weak beep accompanies the slide of a door. 

Inside the walls of the forest the air is damp and rich with life. There are no mammals anymore except monkeys, just birds—feral descendants of pigeons, mostly, and not much to look at or hear. But there are some decent trees—shaggily barked eucalyptus, mossy and knotted beech, and Australian pine. Plentiful oxygen, recently transformed from toxic carbon, as well as copious phytoncides, infuse the air with a heady, healthy quality. 

Though the forest appears to crescend to a point from the outside, and indeed there is a mound, at the center of that mound is a staircase, a wide spiral that descends down into the earth. One of the reasons Anthy feeds Chu-Chu and all the Chu-Chus before him is the role they play in keeping the old loading staircase clean and thereby impress the Duelists. Anthy though, she prefers to take the elevator. 

The quick descent ends with a beep and the whoosh of doors. The hallways in the main facility are dark, and there are whole rooms and quadrants she hasn’t seen in centuries—not that the motion-activated lights don’t work anymore, but rather she eschews those areas for the reason that they are too painful, their hope and spirit of enterprise still clinging to them long after the people who generated those feelings incinerated. When she walks down the bare hall, orange and red lights flicker on. It’s a shame this particular design was in vogue at the time of the apocalypse, since that nineties hyper-futuristic vibe isn’t her aesthetic. 

The hall rejoins the main thoroughfare that the grand staircase leads to. A final short elevator ride in an annoying mirrored and decorative elevator (honestly, it was a science facility but who thought a diagram showing the stages of a pupae was attractive decoration?) brings her to the wide hangar floor, a room several stories tall and empty except for unused and broken repair equipment and several cars stored in a dozen vehicle bays. 

Anthy knows the mechanical beasts of patchwork metal are not cars, no matter how many wheels have been added over time or how many exhaust pipes welded to the frames. Their hearts are space-age, built to escape from the earth at 28,000 kilometers per hour and speed away from the solar system traveling at dizzying speeds of 40,000 kilometers per hour. 

Yet, like Anthy within this patchwork cage, they are trapped by the metal weight of survival in a new world, their original purpose forgotten, and the wishes and desires and yearnings of so many humans layered upon them. 

There is some time yet before the Duelists arrive. 

She aimlessly caresses the car that Juri drives. It’s a lean, orange machine with the rounded hood of a Jaguar and its slim silhouette. She touches the ignition, a round button in the shape of a rose crest. Only the rose rings can slip into the grooves of the ignition and start the cars. 

There are only four rings anymore. The others were lost to the wasteland outside, along with their drivers and the vehicles. There only four vehicles too. 

Technically there are five, but the pink chariot-like vehicle stored in the rear garage has never been used. Anthy can’t even bear to look at it.

Dios was supposed to be its pilot, back when humanity had ambitions to spread to the rest of the galaxy—back when the skies and seas were blue and unpolluted with fallout. Dios loved humanity; he cared that humanity reached its escape velocity before being doomed to the constant wars mushrooming across the planet, spreading spores of hate to the fertile lands of upturned lives. Anthy told him he didn’t need to, that they, at least, could continue living on Earth no matter what and that humanity was none of their concern. Australia had been a nice place to live, and she was happy with her animal-in-space studies, especially after Dios found a place to hide his magic in the spacecraft division. But Dios’s heart had always been too big and too outwardly focused. 

On that day, the day humanity died in a white-hot cluster of bombs, he too became white-hot with magic, raising ships from the sea, lifting roofs from house and columns from museums. His telekinetic grandeur bodily lifted people into the bubble Anthy held strong above their aerospace testing facility. 

The descendants of those survivors populated Ohtori today, living their brief half-lives until they reproduced then graduated to the outside world. Those who left did not return and Anthy assumed they succumbed to the poisonous atmosphere.

 _No, stop._ The point of the Duels was to distract her from getting lost in the past. It is time to perform her role.

Anthy disrobes. 

She folds the uniform and places in a storage cabinet. Her red dress appears in a casual flourish of magic.

Then she stands and waits. 

“It’s hardly a matter of sheer timing, Miki,” comes a silky smooth voice. Right on cue, the candy-colored frames of the student council exit the main elevator.

“Still, I think with better telemetry we could improve our fuel efficiency. This stopwatch will be my key,” Miki says, showing an aged stopwatch to the red-haired playboy leader of the council. 

“That’s if you can drive and play with your toy at the same time,” Juri scoffs. 

“All that matters is handling,” Saionji says. 

“Like you’re any good at that,” Juri says. “Have you seen your car?”

The green-haired boy seethes, but no one pays attention to him.

“Tanks are full again, I see. Thank you Anthy,” Touga speaks to Anthy with a smile, though it annoys Juri. He does it, she thinks, for the express purpose of reminding them all of his superiority as charismatic president of the student council.

“Of course,” she smiles back politely.

But now that he’s the center of attention, Touga just has to push things by making a loaded statement. “I suppose it really is worth it to water those roses, knowing they make an great source of biofuel,” he says. 

Oh, it’s a bold declaration. 

Juri, Miki and even Saionji freeze, letting that mental connection spark and settle. Anthy wants to laugh. It’s laughable how many Duelists have come and gone without even questioning what fuels their cars.

“That’s nonsense,” Juri dismisses Touga. “If fuel were limitless, then we could have longer Duels to find resources.”

“No, but,” Miki muses. His logical mind was caught in the enticing simplicity of it. “Water is a finite resource, so roses are also a finite resource.”

“It doesn’t have to be limitless to be the fuel source of our cars, idiots,” Saionji points out, rather an astute observation for the brute.

“It makes sense. You’d just need a special facility to process the biofuel, one out of the way that can operate all the time. Wouldn’t that be right, Rose Bride?” Touga puts Anthy on the spot. 

“Yes, that’s right,” Anthy smiled fakely. 

Touga’s self-satisfied smirk is evident as he slides into his car. It’s a four-seater, a handsome vehicle that’s red and muscled, with round crystal headlights. Anthy knows how much he loves that car; she’s seen him doing crude things in it while she absently watched surveillance footage. 

Juri frowns, upset at Touga usurping her position of authority sneakily. There’s no need for her to be upset, though. Touga’s wrong. 

Touga isn’t the first student council member to make that mistaken assumption. He has nothing on the intrepidness of Mikage, who not only theorized that biofuel was made from roses, but when so far as to build a biofuel production facility in the one place where Anthy rarely went: Nemuro Memorial Hall, the burial ground of all the former Duelists. 

Sadly, Mikage was now buried in the Memorial Hall, his ambitions subsumed to the Duels like all the other Duelists, stopped by broken bodies before they could break the birdcage. 

But neither Mikage nor Touga guessed the truth. 

Mikage, though, made her uncomfortable, because he had begun to hallucinate another version of her, a male version. As far as she knew, the only male version of her had burned out in a blaze of compassion a hundred years prior. Given their powers, she had to wonder if perhaps Dios persisted. But her hope quickly died again and she received no more signs. 

Anthy decides to test and mislead Touga. “How did you know about the biofuel?” she asks. 

“End of the World told me,” Touga replies. 

“I see,” Anthy smiles. This time the expression is genuine. 

Touga’s answer reveals he is bluffing. End of the World is incapable of speech. To these poor kids who had never seen technology more advanced than their dashboards of their cars, the truth of End of the World was inconceivable. 

“Enough talk,” Juri gruffs. “Start the Duel, Anthy.”

“Yes,” the Rose Bride assents. She takes her place at the door, where she enters a code only known to her into a keypad. The immense doors of the facility creak open, revealing the arid wasteland beyond. Alarms bells sound, alerting staff who no longer exist to clear the way for the massive gates. Blinding white light penetrates the dark recesses of the hangar. Anthy stares out at the dry, ruined land, seeing nothing but a deeper loss than the young humans around her can understand. 

“Grant us the power of revolutions per minute!” Juri shouts above the whirring, thrumming engines come to life with the twist of a rose ring. 

The revving posse zooms out of Ohtori onto the empty plains. They disappear like ants into the beaten landscape. The sun beats down mercilessly through earth’s thin atmosphere. The air tastes bitter and chalky. It is laced with radiation, and going out into the radioactive wasteland directly causes the Duelists’ early deaths. Only their chivalry and the mania intrinsic to Duelists propels them forward. Dust billows up behind Juri’s car like the plume of an exceptionally dull-colored peacock. The wasteland is a reddish brown bowl peppered with boulders, sweeping up into imposing mesas and jagged mountain ranges at some points but otherwise stretching out into eternity. 

Anthy waits. 

She sees the puffy billows of smoke thrown up when they encounter another car and tussle, as always. 

She waits. 

Finally the cars are racing back. Their faraway whine deepens into a deep rumble as they near the launch ramp. The student council members look put-out, and Anthy chances a glance at Miki, but he looks equally unhappy. Anthy almost doesn’t register the fact that there’s a fifth car until a mane of candy pink hair whips past. Anthy’s eyes follow belatedly, drawn to that bold, unexpected flourish after staring at the desert for so long. A beat-up green jeep that she’s never seen stops in the middle of the garage. 

“Ah~” the pink-haired woman jumps from the jeep. Its plate says Wakaba. “You guys have some seriously nice digs here. This is the nicest garage I’ve ever seen. Way better than parking on one of the car transports.”

She stretched her arms high in the air, then bends over, stretching her back. 

Anthy’s mind can’t keep up. Who is this stranger, this interloper—

“So, where’s this Rose Bride I’m engaged to now?”

***

Anthy never thought she’d be so upset at Juri losing a Duel. Forget the ideal of being betrothed to Miki, she’s now betrothed to a complete stranger. A very foreign person with weird tastes and strange mores. 

Anthy is still upset about the apocalypse, dammit, she set up Ohtori the way she did so that no stranger with no understanding of her or Dios could interrupt her sadness. 

Yet, just on Utena Day One, Anthy had to move from the classy rooms in the main dormitory to an oft-unused one far from the Tower or the Forest. She will be cleaning this place forever!

Utena is thoughtless and rude. She has the cavalier air of a person who has been living as a nomad—which in fact she has, for at least half her life since her parents died. She has terrible habits such as leaving the doors open all the time and wearing very revealing tank tops. She jumps over everything and, provided a choice of the full wardrobe of Ohtori, she chose the black uniform that no one currently wears and shorts. Shorts in the apocalypse! Most of all, she exists, with a real human smell and making real human breathing noises, in Anthy’s space. 

Yet there is the matter of the ring she wears on her finger.

Anthy longs to know the truth of it. As they slump in their platonic bed, she stares at it gleaming in the moonlight, Utena’s sparkle somehow managing to make silver warm as rose. 

Utena claims that she found it in a roving giant castle when she was a child, shortly after her parents died. 

Anthy refuses to believe it’s true, but the story moves all the other Duelists. They too believe in the myth of the Castle on 18 Wheels. After all, it’s the mecca they search for on their Duels, hoping to raid its resources. They all claim to have seen it at multiple points. Anthy herself knows it’s a lie. It’s a mirage. Just a dreamy lie of earthly abundance conjured up by the parched earth and the heated air and monotonous wasteland. 

Utena swears it exists. 

The problem is, if it’s true, then Dios built more than one refuge for humanity. 

What Anthy truly loathes about the whole situation is that Utena might know more than her. 

She equally loathes the idea that Dios hasn’t contacted her in the three centuries, yet has bothered to maintain a place that seems to have only been used for one silly little girl to enter, and give his rose ring to. 

She is concerned for Dios’s well-being too—is he still hurting? Did he send her the rose ring as a sign to come help him? Doesn’t he know she is in too much pain, as if she herself was gutted by a bomb, to dare to hope or search? 

Yet Utena forces her to confront these feelings and she hates that. 

Anthy tries to remain Rose Bride-neutral, but it’s hard when this person she already hates keeps throwing her curveballs. 

Time passes and Utena keeps outpacing the others in the Duels.

Anthy softens. She isn’t sure how she’s come to be worn down by Utena’s constant care. The pink-haired girl’s attention is less like an abrasive cat’s tongue and more like a soft, worn rag, polishing Anthy until she has started to shine. She isn’t sure of the transformation’s meaning, but something in her psyche feels different than before. 

***

“Is this where you want to do the sketching?” Utena asks, her earnest tone. 

Giant sketchpads in hand, the pair of girls has taken the elevator up to the top of the Tower, above the level used by the student council, to the Observation floor. Utena still believes they are going to be completing homework given to them in class, but Anthy has very different plans. She wants to say that she’s intending to put Utena in her place, but knows she’s doing the exact opposite. She’s giving Utena a chance to understand—to alter—everything. Once they enter the room with a security code only she knows pressed into the PIN pad, she discards her pad on a plush red couch.

“No,” Anthy answers, and the word feels foreign in her mouth—as it has every right to, given she hasn’t said it and meant it in so long. 

Utena gasps at the looming telescope in the room. Its bulbous double-lobed mass dwarfs the rest of the room. The bulbs rest parallel to the floor, like an infinity sign, one end pointed at a slit in the Tower and looks out at the wasteland. 

“This is massive! Cool! What it is it?” Utena says, already climbing on the stepladder to the raised viewing platform. Her pale, slender hands clasp the black-painted metal handrails, and Anthy feels a surge of desire for those hands to finally touch her already, and press into the deepest parts of her. 

Anthy follows slowly, not answering. 

“Ah!” Utena bends over when a piece of tape that Anthy knows very well catches her eye. “What’s this? This piece of tape says something, but I can’t read. You can, right, Anthy?”

“It’s AKIO,” Anthy says. Afocal Convex Collector Infinity Optics, ACCIO. Akio. 

“Like a name?” Utena says. She surveys the expanse of the round metal telescope with its idiosyncratic mirrors and refractors. “So its name is Akio, huh?”

Now that they’re here, Anthy doesn’t want to do this anymore. She isn’t even sure what it was that she set out to do, bringing Utena here. 

“What does Akio do?” Utena asks, bending and pressing on buttons, as if it were a car that needed a tune up. 

Suddenly Utena presses something that turns Akio on. The lights in the room go out, and the newly minted darkness fills with projections of planets, the distance between them sprinkled with infinite stars. The universe, as mapped by Dios’s exploratory interstellar program shimmers like a tantalizing mirage above them. A bright pink line strides across the map, starting at a dot that represents on small planet, looping around several more and ending at another small dot. 

“Whoa!” Utena shouts.

Anthy’s eyes widen in total surprise. 

What Utena has unlocked is Dios’s route to a planet their project had identified for terraforming. The route is a bright pink line that clearly shows an escape route for humanity off this troubled planet. In all her time at Ohtori, Anthy has never seen it. 

“What is all this?” Utena marvels. “It’s so pretty.”

Anthy knew, of course, that Dios had been working hard at the facility to craft a means and a way for humanity to achieve interstellar flight, that he had been passionate about humanity achieving their dreams. 

_“We’ll revolutionize the world,” he said at their home. “Humanity won’t be confined to Earth. Science will flourish.”_

He had given the program so much,

_“They wouldn't listen, but then I outlined a plan for a first wave. Before the big colonizing ship goes, there will be experimental flights to several candidate planets. It’s hard for me to think in terms of human years, and it’s hard for them to think in the long term. But we’ll meet.”_

He had promised so much,

_“We’ve got the navigation down, but they don’t have enough volunteers for the one-way flights. Anthy, I’m going to—“_

Fate had intervened before the project got off the ground. 

The massive wall clock behind them still counts down to project End of the World's target launch date. There are still months left on it from a count of centuries: that was the amazing scope of Dios's vision.

Anthy doesn’t want these devastating feelings, rushing up. She collapses to the floor, something wet stinging her eyes. The sound of school shoes on metal echoes in the vast chamber, and everything grows bright again. 

“Himemiya!” Utena cries. Warm, slender hands, those ones she desired so dearly, shake her. She is enveloped in thin, strong arms and carried to the couch. Those arms keep her in embrace.

Anthy clutches the other girl's sleeve, and Utena leans in closer. Soft lips press against her cheeks, absolving them of their tears. 

Suddenly an alarm bell tolls, alerting all to a Duel. 

Anthy and Utena look at each other, both bleary and disoriented as if being woken from a dream. But it is more that they are being called back into a dream, a dream of Anthy’s making. 

“Stay here,” Utena says. The pink-haired girl goes to the window and doesn’t move. 

Anthy gets up eventually, touching her now-dry cheek. She looks to see what has Utena transfixed at the window. 

It’s the castle, looming large and pulled up right against Ohtori. 

Belatedly, Anthy recalls that the tolling bells aren’t actually a signal for the Duel starting but the warning bell for the garage opening. In the distance, she can faintly hear the revving of the engines. 

Touga must have memorized the code, the sneaky bastard, and seeing the castle's approach, decided to take all the spoils for himself.

The castle is a sight to behold though, countless turrets and towers springing from glittering towers. Anthy can hardly blame Touga for leaving. The castle is beyond imagination. It looks like a toy a child might find attractive and mesmerizing, blown up to preposterous size. It sparkles in the deepening night, as if coated in diamonds and painted with glitter. Yet only the sound of Touga’s engine is audible. The castle itself is silent. 

Students throng to the courtyard. A couple of pastel shapes are running towards the Forest, where the castle is parked. 

“It’s an illusion, isn’t it?” Utena suddenly says. "Created by Akio."

Anthy looks sharply at her companion. Utena’s pale face is speckled with a rainbow of dancing colored light from the castle. Her expression is calm as she faces the bright dream. Utena’s hand reaches out slowly, and Anthy takes it.

“You’re real, aren’t you?” Utena says. She squeezes Anthy’s hand. 

“Yes,” Anthy answers. 

Utena finally looks away from the illusion. Reflected sparkles of the castle’s light recede as Utena leans down.

Anthy leans up. 

When their lips meet in a gentle, slow kiss, Anthy finally lets go of her illusions as well. The pins disappear and her hair escapes into its long, wild mess. The silly school uniform melts away until Anthy is pressed naked against the real, warm body of the woman she’s come to feel irresistible affection for. 

After a few more kisses pass, Utena breaks away and smiles. 

“Let’s go,” Utena says. “Let’s get out of this place.”

Anthy thinks of a pink car, still space-age and strong, that she can fuel indefinitely with her magic as she has always fueled the cars. It has been waiting this whole time for her, but only now, thanks to Utena, can she acknowledge it. 

“I know the way out,” Anthy says, smiling.

**Author's Note:**

> The permutations that a fusion of Revolutionary Girl and Mad Max could create are endless. What a singularly inspired prompt! This work was deeply informed by the car designs in Adolescence of Utena, and I'm sad that the story didn’t progress in a way that involved battles between the cars. Also sad that Utena and Anthy never got to tool around together in cool desert gear being badasses, and that my original ending image of Utena and Anthy in space never came to be. Instead: surprise exact same ending as the movie!
> 
> I most regret that I couldn’t fit in the detail I most wanted: the shadow girls being the permanent shadowy fingerprints of a nuclear bomb explosion.


End file.
